Mignola’s body of work came up as touchstone for the production designer of \'Hellboy\'

The Hellboy production required the services of roughly 1,200 cast and crew members. Three units shot on location in the United Kingdom and Bulgaria, and on more than 20 sets at Nu Boyana Studios in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia.
Production designer Paul Kirby and director of photography Lorenzo Senatore worked with director Neil Marshall to devise a color palette based on the Hellboy comics. “The original material Mike Mignola produced has a brilliant palette,” says Kirby. “When you see Hellboy, he’s the only red in the frame. When he’s not in frame, something else is red — a fire, the Blood Queen’s costume. All of the rest of the colors are these muted tertiary colors. That was something we really strove to do in the design.”

Kirby’s overall approach revolved around creating mostly realistic-looking sets that contrast sharply with the film’s supernatural elements and characters. “I think when fantasy is a little more grounded, it feels stranger, in a way,” he explains. “It’s like if you saw a giant or a monster in your house. It’s the balance of something that’s out of place that makes it look weird and scary.”

To illustrate, Kirby points to Hellboy’s journey into the depths of the Osiris Club, where he is briefed about the giant-hunting mission. “It starts as this English country house,” says the designer. “There are suits of armor on stands, guns, muskets, swords.

Then, the further you get into it, the strangeness is incrementally cranked up. A few occultist things scattered about. Then, even further in, there are trophy heads from their hunts. We incorporated mixtures of human and animal forms, including a skull with spiders’ legs. It notches up to a 12 on a one-to-10 scale of weird.”

At times, translating the comic’s 2D illustrations to the 3D world of cinema required some thoughtful modification. One example is the wildly imaginative home of Baba Yaga, a Slavic folklore witch who appears throughout the comic book series, usually to taunt or torture Hellboy. “In legend, as in Mike’s illustrations, it’s a little house that walks around on chicken legs,” says Kirby. “But what looks great in a comic book page won’t always work on a movie screen.

The most important thing to Mike was that it had the quality of the TARDIS, the time machine from ‘Doctor Who,’ in that it’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. But with the house moving through the forest towards Hellboy, we wanted verticality in order to see it coming. So, we wound up with this tower that looms over him as it moves before settling down and becoming this doorway into Baba Yaga’s lair.”

Out of all of the film’s intricate sets, Kirby says he’s proudest of the environment he created for the climactic sequence between Hellboy and Nimue, set on Pendle Hill, the site of England’s most notorious witch trials in the 17th century. “There are some scenes viewers might expect would be shot on a set, but when Hellboy’s standing on a hill with the Blood Queen, you don’t imagine the landscape has been created,” he says.

“Sometimes, you want to feature design, knowing that people are going to see it and relate to it as such. But sometimes, you want design to be invisible. You don’t want people to question, ‘Is that a real tree?’ ‘Is that a real rock?’ ‘Is that on a stage?’ You just want them to enjoy the story.”

Hellboy is slated to release on April 12.